Tutu Fears Nuclear Holocaust By White Leaders Of South Africa

January 10, 1986|By Washington Post

WASHINGTON — Bishop Desmond Tutu, South Africa's Nobel Peace Prize winner, said Thursday that prospects for his racially troubled nation were ''quite horrendous'' and suggested that the country's white rulers might use nuclear weapons to carry out ''their own version of a scorched-earth policy.''

''I myself actually fear that in the end, because they are so irrational, they seem to have a Samson complex. They are going to pull down the pillars and everybody must go under with them,'' Tutu said in an interview with editors and reporters at The Washington Post.

''If, as most of us believe, they do have nuclear capability, I don't put it past them to have their own version of a scorched-earth policy,'' he said of the white minority regime in Pretoria.

Tutu is in the United States on a three-week tour to rally American support for additional U.S. sanctions against South Africa for its apartheid policies. The 54-year-old Anglican Bishop of Johannesburg somberly suggested that his own patience is wearing thin in the search for non-violent ways to overthrow apartheid.

''You may find,'' Tutu remarked, ''that even placid, quiet people like us have suddenly picked up stones and we are fighting.''

Tutu predicted the onset of ''an ugly phase which has the potential for being horrible'' in South Africa, a time of ''naked terrorism, really.'' He warned that militant black attacks on ''soft targets,'' such as school buses, were now possible. He also conjured the image of black servants poisoning their white masters.

''Virtually all school buses in South Africa carry only white children,'' he noted. ''They are the softest of soft targets.''

The African National Congress, the main black underground nationalist group, has thus far refrained from attacking such targets, although Tutu said it would be ''the easiest way of sowing panic in the white community.''

''Most white households still have their morning coffee brought to them by black servants,'' he continued. ''Supposing the ANC, or whoever is behind all this, were able to reach even just a quarter of those servants and say, 'Look, here is something that we want you to slip into their early-morning coffee.' ''

He also upbraided the Reagan administration for an ''inconsistent'' use of economic sanctions.

The Reagan administration is willing to ''justify everything'' because Pretoria ''says it is anti-communist'' and because ''we've come to accept a thousand deaths because they are black.''